Friday, April 27, 2012

Lots of old photos now available

Call it “Forward to the Future.” The Bloomberg administration unveiled a trove of 870,000 digitized images and media from the city archives Tuesday, with photographs dating from 1858, color images from the 1980s of every building in the city, and farm maps dating to 160 years ago. The gallery is accessible free on the city’s Web site (though opening-day traffic was so heavy that it’s been down most of the afternoon), and reprints and digital copies are available for purchase.

The collections represent a still life of New York: an unfinished bridge, the mug shot of a forgotten criminal, a murder victim in a barrel, two ocean liners, ships passing by day, a Sanitation Department horse cart.

The searchable gallery includes all the holdings or a representative sample from 30 historic collections, including 1,300 photographs from the 1930s taken by the Federal Writers’ Project and 15,000 shot by Eugene de Salignac, on assignment for the Department of Bridges from 1906 to 1934. The oldest photograph is of the site of Central Park before construction began.

The collections, including films, maps and other media, were available at the Municipal Archives at 31 Chambers Street behind City Hall; only a few hundred were previously available online.

The Departments of Citywide Administrative Services and Records and Information Services produced the online archive and will continue to add digitized content.

Not to mention, in the name of "progress" that exact site in the picture, where all those independent stores once stood, sits... a giant empty lot with a plywood fence around it as it sits waiting for the economy to turn around.

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